Category Archives: events

The new understanding of a system… You do not need to understand the system by way of factoring in … a certain form of essence. All you need is two things, the behaviour and functional organisation. Technical understanding of a function is that functions are abstractly realisable entities.

Functions allows for an understanding of the system that is no longer chained to the idea of constitution. System is understood as a functional integration with stabilised causal components that are inferentially linked

System of functions, and properties that need to be amplified in order to be detected

“…the totality of the system is an illusion, all there is in an integration of functions”

This is the program of ethics – i.e.: “know thyself” – the experimental or interventionist tendency in philosophy. The self is a substance, that needs to be ‘worked on’

Defining explanation by the invention of causation

invariance

‘explaning’ the shadow requires dealing with it’s cause

Manipulation becomes constitution – intervention

Simondon: Orders of Magnitude (reminds here of the different scales of materiality)

Foucault: The aesthetics of existence

The new understanding of a system… You do not need to understand the system by way of factoring in … a certain form of essence. All you need is two things, the behaviour and functional organisation. Technical understanding of a function is that functions are abstractly realisable entities.

Functions allows for an understanding of the system that is no longer chained to the idea of constitution. This is functional organisation. System is understood… as a functional integration. A system has stabilised causal components that are inferentially linked by way of functions. This is navigation between causally stabilised components, mechanisms of the systems, in order to escape from the constitution it was supposed to belong to.

Understanding of behaviours is directly linked to what function is, in a technical sense. Behaviours are linked to tendencies — abstract properties that are responsible for the behaviour of the system… And you cannot identify them unless you amplify them. So there is a certain form of ‘intervention’ involved.

“Manipulation becomes the very understanding of constitution” – making sense of ontology means tampering with ontology

Questions

There are different ways of generating epistemology and ontology at the same time as it’s dealing with experiential knowledge that the perceiver is implicated in. The technologies of the self … are very different (letter writing, dream analysis, etc.). There’s a difference between a practice and intelligibly… There is experience that the perceiver is implicated in

Seneca / Foucault — ethics as a design of conduct that manipulates self

In art, you don’t have intelligibility — you have material inferences, but you do have a form of refinement…

Art has multi-modality — but these things are of course implicated in the design, engineering worlds…

To know yourself – epistemic ethic — fallibility of materials

System of functions, and properties that need to be amplified in order to be detected

“…the totality of the system is an illusion, all there is in an integration of functions”

This is the program of ethics – i.e.: “know thyself” – the experimental or interventionist tendency in philosophy. The self is a substance, that needs to be ‘worked on’

teapot as masculine — moved from a domestic environment into the male laboratory (hidden labour of women — when women were computers)… the story of the “breadboard” as a bridge object of a similar sort at Bell Labs

flight simulator? why *flight* simulator

are technical histories continuous? why are the links between these elements necessary…?

The enormous church of S. Maria Maggiore stands on one of Rome’s seven famous hills. Originally the site was very unkempt, as can be seen in an old fresco painting in the Vatican. Later, the slopes were smoothed and articulated with a flight of steps up to the apse of the basilica. The many tourists who are brought to the church on sight-seeing tours hardly notice the unique character of the surroundings. They simply check off one of the starred numbers in their guide-books and hasten on to the next one. But they do not experience the place in the way some boys I saw there a few years ago did. I imagine they were pupils from a nearby monastery school. They had a recess at eleven o’clock and employed the time playing a very special kind of ball game on the broad terrace at the top of the stairs. It was apparently a kind of football but they also utilised the wall in the game, as in squash — a curved wall, which they played against with great virtuousity. When the ball was out, it was most decidedly out, bouncing down all the steps and rolling several hundred feet further on with an eager boy rushing after it, in and out among motor cars and Vespas down near the great obelisk.

I do not claim that these Italian youngsters learned more about architecture than the tourists did. But quite unconsciously they experienced certain basic elements of architecture: the horizontal planes and the vertical walls above the slopes. And they learned to play on these elements. As I sat in the shade watching them, I sensed the whole three-dimensional composition as never before. At a quarter past eleven the boys dashed off, shouting and laughing. The great basilica stood once more in silent grandeur.

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed. (Potential energy is the energy of the pure event, whereas forms of actualization correspond to the realization of the event). In the second place, singularities posses a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast. In the third place, singularities or potentials haunt the surface. Everything happens at the surface in a crystal which develops only on the edges. Undoubtedly, an organism is not developed in the same manner. An organism does not cease to contract in an interior space and to expand in an exterior space–to assimilate and to externalize. But membranes are no less important, for they carry potentials and regenerate polarities. They place internal and external spaces into contact without regard to distance. The internal and external, depth and height, have biological value only through this topological surface of contact. Thus, even biologically, it is necessary to understand that ‘the deepest is the skin.’ The skin has as its disposal a vital and properly superficial potential energy. And just as events do not occupy the surface but rather frequent it, superficial energy is not localized at the surface, but is rather bound to its formation. Gilbert Simondon has expressed this very well: the living lives at the limit of itself, on its limit… The characteristic polarity of life is at the level of the membrane; it is here that life exists in an essential manner, as an aspect of a dynamic topology which itself maintains the metastability by which it exists… The entire content of internal space is topologically in contact with the content of external space at the limits of the living; there is, in fact, no distance in topology; the entire mass of living matter contained in the internal space is actively present to the external world at the limit of the living… To belong to interiority does not mean only to ‘be inside,’ but to be on the ‘in-side’ of the limit… At the level of the polarized membrane, internal past and external future face one another.

“Chaos does not exist; it is an abstraction because it is inseparable from a screen that makes something – something rather than nothing – emerge from it.”

“Each new prehension becomes a datum. It becomes public, but for other prehensions that objectify it; the event is inseparably the objectification of one prehension and the subjectification of another; it is at once public and private, potential and real, participating in the becoming of another event and the subject of its own becoming.”

“To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.” — Franklin

“Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced. Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule.” — Bacon

“You cannot divorce discussions of self improvement from discussions of improvement — and I say this to anyone who is wearing a pair of glasses, using a computer, etc.”

“ But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages ” — Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776

An exchange that mutually improves – Gedankenexperiment: What happens when exchange becomes investment?

Ford – River Rouge – Mass production – What about the importance of the “human capital of driving.”

“Innovations are transformations of individual capabilities — as individual self interest evolves — the opportunities for new forms of innovation explode”

This is misunderstood by contemporary economics — but was understood by Smith (Self-improvement)

“The basic resource in any company is the people.”

“The reason why we are on a higher imaginative level is not because we have finer imaginations, but because we have better instruments. In science, the most important thing that has happened over the last forty years is the advance in instrumental design.” — A.N. Whitehead An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge

privacy as an interpersonal boundary process by which people regulate interaction with others

social network services

sharing — ’emic’ notion… there are many activities where we are consciously deciding at different ‘granularities’ of privacy — fitbits (you don’t make a decision about each footstep), or tracking on Facebook (you don’t get to make a decision if you’re using the system)

Interpersonal boundary regulation is a cooperative effort

‘Opt-in’ systems provide a huge workload for people

Sharing is not just about online practices — telling someone not to take pictures of you at a party, exchanging

Aesthetically motivated investigation (e.g.: Music being the reason we invented math)

Love (Steve Jobs, Bruno Latour)

Polanyi’s Nice – Eva Zeisel – head of the largest factory in the world in Hungary – arrested for plotting the death of Stalin (Hans Zeisel)

To end the dualisms of form and function

Transient novelty

The Semiotic Handle — “Technology of Enchantment” (Alfred Gell)

“A Matter of Taste” – Stanley L. (study of naming)

Tastes rise and fall over time…

Indigenous and Exogenous forces

Thoughts

Happiness (like technology) is not a thing, not a goal, but an effect of other things. The importance of work.

That all improvement is self-improvement. Self-interest. Communalism and ‘the gift.’ Think of the inherent interests of the ‘programmer’ or ‘artists —> the interest in the material, in the obsessive/fetish, etc. How to balance this

The difference between innovation, invention — as external or internal to creators / societies / communities

Somehow this discussion of Newton and his massive influence — makes it seem that there is a ‘constructed’ world of ideas — everyone reading into and reacting to the system of erudite and enlightened ideas…

The invention of privacy

How a prototype argues — how a design argues — how an invitation argues

The Possibility of media forms that don’t address humans at the perceptual level

Whitehead’s ‘neutral theory of subjectivity’ – all processes in the world – when sensors gather data they are having subjective

“perception in the mode of presentational immediacy.”

what we need is a new concept of perception –

21st century media extends our perception – traces, analytics, sensory experience that are not available to conscious awareness

toward a non-conscious sensibility

the technical distribution of sensibility – humans should embrace their reliance on systems of data analytics as supplements to their activity

Person of Interest – The Machine – antiterrorist system – knowledge is impossible, so they have to get involved – surveillance tech. There no interface – the machine has all the information – they are submitting themselves to the data…

Precogs – visions don’t agree with each other – the images are subject to hermeneutic analysis

How is this difference from punk? This is different as it is more fluid, changing boundary and scales

Or a cutoff of the subcultures

Aesthetic judgement – “there are certain things that are good and certain things that are bad”

Technical and human infrastructures – aren’t these the same? (Stiegler)

“Playing the network” – having power around

Proletarian image of the technician – is there a place in this discourse for the technician, the engineer – the systems developers – particularly in the flipping of 4chan – memes – meme generator …. not in terms of origin, but in terms of the technician’s own techno-aesthetic interest or motivation?

Art Platforms – “brilliance” – baktin and simondon to add the aesthetic side of the becoming. What becoming is

There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as one of these…drugs. If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an affront to the dignity of the eye and the telephone to the dignity of the ear. Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge. They provide the raw materials of wisdom, and are useful to the extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into the whole pattern of his behavior and the whole system of his knowledge – Alan Watts, Joyous Cosmology

Andrew Pickering – on the dream machine…

I think of flicker as a peculiar sort of technology of the self—a technique for producing states of being that depart from the everyday—and we can explore several of them, material and social, and their associated states as we go along. Walter also offered cybernetic analyses of yogic feats and the achievement of nirvana. All of this research makes sense if one thinks of the brain as per- formative, and it connects, in ways that we can explore further, both to the spiritual dimension of cybernetics and to the sixties. – The Cybernetic Brain Sketches

Aldous Huxley – The doors of perception – William Blake – John Cunstable – “This is not drawing this is inspiration” – “I have meant it to be drawing”

Stages a split between active human agency between active human beings and static things – the split is asymmetric

What connects things and people – is sight (sense) and cognition

This asymmetric dualism – is the natural ontological attitude of the modern west.

The ontological politics – specific ontologies to specific practices

Science is a “dance of agency” – material performances in the lab – in scientific research nature doesn’t perform in a machine like fashion. The point of research is to be surprised – brutal emergence, becoming.

Glaser – bound up in the dance – not in control – time lapse images – bubble track. “He had somehow lined himself up with the material world…”

Taoist – “we are just there in one corner of being”

Art teachers us about the Tao in technologies – the symmetry or dance of agency